Free Lassiter 06 - Fool Me Twice by Paul Levine

stool,
and climbed up until I was looking straight into the face of a dead
man. A thin copper wire circled his neck and was looped through the
motor housing of the fan. But that’s not what killed him. The
bright splash of cloth was an imported silk tie knotted by someone
unfamiliar with the double Windsor. The knot dug deeply into the
neck, just below the Adam’s apple.
    The tie was a palette of blues and reds and
would have looked swell with a dark suit and a white oxford cloth
shirt. In fact, it always looked swell just that way.
    I should know. It was my tie.
    I climbed down and went into the kitchen
where I found a knife I use for cleaning fish. Up again, and this
time, I hoisted the body with one hand placed under his chin and
sawed through the copper wire. He dropped like a tree, banging the
floor. I got down, covered the body with an old beach towel, and
went out to the car.
    I hustled Kip inside, told
him he had been right, apologized for doubting him, and said
everything would be okay, the cops would be here soon. I turned on
the TV to distract him from the lump in the corner of the room, but
in what must have been a first, he wasn’t interested. It took about
ninety seconds, but he wasn’t scared anymore. He began babbling
excitedly, asking questions, wanting to help, telling me how
totally awesome and off-the-Richter it was to have a murder in the
house, and did it happen often, and was somebody trying to set me
up, like Gene Hackman did to Kevin Costner in No Way Out , which was a remake
of The Big Clock with Charles Laughton and Ray Milland, in case I didn’t know,
which I didn’t. He asked if we could keep the body a while, like
the boys did in Weekend at Bernie’s. I told him to calm down, but
he kept chattering away, and I finally figured that it wasn’t quite
real to him. Just another movie.
    I was trying to concentrate, to figure it
out, but Kip was carrying on about murder plots, so I led him to
the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and popped the porcelain top
on a sixteen-ounce Grolsch. I found two glasses that didn’t appear
to carry contagious diseases and poured half into one and half into
the other.
    “ How ‘bout a beer, Kip?” I
asked, handing him a glass.
    “ Wow, that’s completely
broly of you, Uncle Jake,” Kip said, which I took as well-deserved
praise of my child-rearing skills.
    I drained my beer while Kip sipped at his,
making a face.
    Then I had another, sitting on a stool at
the kitchen counter, feeling my pulse rate subside. I needed to
think, to consider what I knew and what I didn’t. There were a
hundred questions, but they all boiled down to two.
    What was Kyle Hornback doing in my house,
and who killed him?
    To answer those two, I
needed to consider what Charlie Riggs called the threshold question
in any unsolved crime. Cui
bono ? Who stands to gain? If I couldn’t
figure that one out, Abe Socolow would be the first to tell me.
First, though, he’d probably ask me something I’d been wondering
ever since I cut down the body.
    Where the hell was Blinky Baroso?
    ***
    Two detectives showed up first, an Anglo
major near retirement age and a young Hispanic who didn’t give his
rank. The older cop had tired eyes and wore a lightweight brown
suit with shiny black shoes. The younger one wore a short-sleeved
white shirt and a blood-red tie. He had the sloping shoulders and
bulging arms of a weight lifter. I had known the major from my days
as an assistant public defender, but we’d never had a case
together. The young one was a stranger to me.
    Abe Socolow walked in five minutes later.
After they convinced themselves that there was indeed a death not
from natural causes, they called the assistant medical examiner
lucky enough to be on weekend duty. Socolow spent the next ten
minutes chewing me out for contaminating the scene, as he put it.
Then the younger detective flexed his triceps and called the
station, asking for what used to be called the crime scene boys,
who